How to Pick the Perfect Bracket Using Math, Science and Modern Technology

As sports fans across the country finish making their final brackets for the men's NCAA basketball tournament, they often look for a perfect strategy or formula to ensure that they will be bringing home the honor of office pool champion.

But discovering the perfect formula is difficult, with different experts making opposite claims, and each sports website's algorithm contradicting the one before it.

In past years, I've consistently stuck to the same strategy, one that emphasized the importance of bragging rights, albeit, I now admit, inaccurately so.

You see, my thinking at the time was that when you accurately predict an upset, you get more bragging rights than if you accurately predict victory by the favored team. The bigger the upset, the greater your bragging rights.  

And so, for years I have consistently picked the ultimate upset...every 16 seed to beat every number 1 seed. The benefit of this strategy is that if even just one 16 seed pulls off the upset, you have gained the ultimate bragging rights- predicting an outcome that no one else foresaw. The only drawback is that, well... your bracket is always completely and utterly busted before the tournament even begins. And, when every 16 seed inevitably loses, the result is: no bragging rights.

So this year I've decided to change my tactics to make myself more competitive in actually winning a pool.

I have come up with what I believe will be a highly successful strategy to winning every March Madness pool, large or small.

Now, you could go to the "experts" at Yahoo!, who's picks rely on little more than speculation, or those at CBS Sports, who rely on what can only be viewed as faulty algorithms, to seek help in making a perfect bracket. But only my formula integrates advanced mathematical formulas, complex scientific theory and the most up-to-date technology to calculate the winner of each game.

First, you must start with what you know. Everything I know about college basketball I learned from my brother-in-law. It can be summarized in the following way:

North Carolina = Good Guys

Duke = Bad Guys

So, using this as our starting point, we know that we must pick the good guys to win the entire tournament. So, pick North Carolina to win every game where they appear, until you have them winning the championship game.

The next step may confuse some people. You may think that it is simple. Our second piece of knowledge is that Duke is bad, so certainly Duke must lose their first game, and immediately be eliminated from the tournament, right?

Wrong.

Every sports fan understands the truth of this basic law of physics:

For every hero there is an equal and opposite villain.

To put it another way, for those who are less of science gurus and more mathematically inclined:

Hero - Villain = No Hero

Well, certainly the good guy must be the hero and the bad guy must be the villain, and so, in order for the Tar Heels to be true heroes, they must overcome an evil villain. And because no other basketball team comes close to the villainy of the Blue Devils, they must face off, head-to-head.

Therefore, the next step is to pick Duke to win every game in which they appear, until they face the Tar Heels and are ultimately defeated in the championship game. This will result in North Carolina not only being crowned as the national champions, but also being recognized as true heroes.

Now, if you're like me, all this math and science, all these theories and formulas, are probably making your head spin. At about this point your brain is starting to hurt and you're not sure how much longer you can keep up this intense concentration.

This is where modern technology comes in.

If you are filling out a bracket online, you can just click on a team and that team's name will be filled in for you, in the next slot. You don't even have to type it out yourself. So, what you do is, you just randomly click on boxes with total disregard for what team you are picking, you don't even have to know what team you are picking, until your entire bracket is full.

And that is how you can use math, science and modern technology to win every pool you enter.  And by winning your pool, you will gain true bragging rights as the most knowledgeable basketball fan in your group of friends or colleagues.